WASHINGTON — Asian Americans endure far more bullying at US schools
than members of other ethnic groups, with teenagers of the community
three times as likely to face taunts on the Internet, new data shows.
Policymakers
see a range of reasons for the harassment, including language barriers
faced by some Asian American students and a spike in racial abuse
following the September 11, 2001 attacks against children perceived as
Muslim.
"This data is absolutely unacceptable and it must change.
Our children have to be able to go to school free of fear," US Education
Secretary Arne Duncan said Friday during a forum at the Center for
American Progress think-tank.
The research, to be released on
Saturday, found that 54 percent of Asian American teenagers said they
were bullied in the classroom, sharply above the 31.3 percent of whites
who reported being picked on.
The figure was 38.4 percent for
African Americans and 34.3 percent for Hispanics, a government
researcher involved in the data analysis told AFP. He requested
anonymity because the data has not been made public.
The disparity was even more striking for cyber-bullying.
Some
62 percent of Asian Americans reported online harassment once or twice a
month, compared with 18.1 percent of whites. The researcher said more
study was needed on why the problem is so severe among Asian Americans.
The
data comes from a 2009 survey supported by the US Justice Department
and Education Department which interviewed some 6,500 students from ages
12 to 18. Asian Americans are generally defined as tracing ancestry to
East Asia, the Indian subcontinent or the South Pacific.
Officials
plan to announce the data during an event in New York on bullying as
part of President Barack Obama's White House Initiative on Asian
Americans and Pacific Islanders.
New Jersey parent Shehnaz
Abdeljaber, who will speak at the event, said she was shocked when she
saw her son's middle school yearbook in which not only classmates but
also a teacher wrote comments suggesting he was a terrorist.
Abdeljaber
soon learned that her son had endured similar remarks at a younger age
but had kept silent. She complained to the school principal but has
since pushed for workshops on bullying that involve teachers and
students.
"We need a more creative approach and more interaction
with the youth, empowering them to do something rather than just going
through the framework of authority," she said.
The Obama
administration has put a priority on fighting bullying. In March, the
president joined Facebook for an online anti-bullying conference, where
he warned that social media was making the problem worse for many
children.
Duncan, the education secretary, warned that bullying
had serious effects as it can lead to mental and physical health
problems including dependence on drugs or alcohol.
Duncan also
voiced concern about high rates of bullying at schools against gay and
lesbians, an issue that has come into greater focus since a spate of
suicides last year among gay teens who were harassed.
"We're seeing folks who somehow seem a little different from the norm bearing the brunt," Duncan said.
"We're trying to shine a huge spotlight on this," he said.
A number of Asian countries have also wrestled with bullying.
Japan
stepped up measures in 2006 after at least four youngsters killed
themselves in a matter of days and the education minister said he had
received an anonymous letter from a bullied student who was
contemplating suicide.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

When the networks were hyping their shows in July at the Television
Critics Association summer press tour, CBS brass approached a number of
critics (this one included) and made a point of talking up the
disappointing sexism in NBC’s The Playboy Club and ABC’s Pan Am.
You know, what a shame it was and how regrettable, in this day and age,
both shows were. Despite being done in a mostly casual manner, the
point was pretty clear: Are you guys going to hammer them over that or
what?

Since I agreed about the sexism (and the fact both shows were bad),
driving home the point wasn’t going to be an issue. However, I did
mention that CBS might want to fix that, ahem, disappointing racism in 2 Broke Girls.
In life, there’s so much letdown for all of us. While The Playboy Club is dead, the vapid Pan Am flies on (a little lower each week, but still), 2 Broke Girls continues to trot out the character of Han Lee (Matthew Moy), the Korean immigrant who runs the dive diner where the two broke girls in question, Max (Kat Dennings) and Caroline (Beth Behrs) work.

Never mind that there’s already been a joke about him being Chinese,
or that one joke had him changing his name to Bryce Lee so that the
writers could get that Bruce Lee joke in – the writers being no
strangers to lame and obvious punch lines – but each week Han’s broken
English gets played like some sorry minstrel show (oh, yeah, there was
that whole karaoke thing, which seemed like yet another reason to mock
Han’s language and point out how funny the letter “r” sounds when you’re
fresh off the boat).
In one episode, when Han got a new iPad, he said “Spread the words.”
To which Max said, “Word.” And guess what Han did – step aside from the
neon freight train of obviousness – he said “Word!” like it was a rap thing.
Sigh.
Every time Han gets to say something on 2 Broke Girls, the
undercurrent is that it’s funny because it’s broken English. Plus he’s
really short and geeky and non-sexual (there may have been other
stereotypes to plop on top of him, but maybe creators Whitney Cummings and Michael Patrick King
thought too much was enough, which would certainly stick with the
general theme of the show). In any case, what CBS is doing every Monday
night is trotting out one of the most regressive and stunning racist
devices a network has produced in five or more seasons.

So, congratulations CBS. (Don’t worry, a follow up column on the sexism of Pan Am is on the way, in case you were worried).
Han’s head-shaking caricature almost let’s you forget that there’s also Oleg (Jonathan Kite) the Eastern European cook whose only role is to be lecherous and onerous.
In a TV world where the Irish and the Italians have all but given up
getting pissed off about stereotypes, you have to wonder if people of
Russian descent also figure to be heavy-accented thugs and goons for all
of eternity. Certainly Asians aren’t making much progress getting the
TV industry to move beyond stereotypes (much less cast them in roles).
There was also a scene in 2 Broke Girls where ex-society
princess Caroline tries to haggle with a woman at Goodwill over the cost
of a pair of shoes. “I can’t believe you tried to shoe her down.”
Oh, clever. A Jew joke. Wink-wink.

In the same episode, a Latina woman who was also at the Goodwill –
and therefore must swear in Spansh when she gets angry, right? – says
flippantly to Max: “You snooze, you lose, puta.”
Oh, CBS, you’re so cute with all of this stuff.
Of course, to quarrel over race jokes on 2 Broke Girls is to
miss a larger point – that its go-to jokes are mostly sexual. This is a
show that has to have at least one vagina joke an episode. It’s not
above turning "a wad of cash" in someone’s face into a joke about a wad
of something else in someone’s face (again, if you didn’t see that
coming five miles away, you’ve never watched 2 Broke Girls).
One episode focused on the stifling heat of New York and Max says,
“Stop fighting it. Just give in to it. I don’t know why I’m quoting a
rapist.” And the laugh track roars its approval.
Have there been rape jokes on Pan Am? Sexist what?

Every joke Oleg says is about sex, even if it’s about salami at first
(see that train coming yet?) or his eyes widening when Christine puts
finger in her mouth and closes her lips around it. “You just made it
into Oleg’s spank bank,” Max tells her.
Man, 12-year-old boys must be eating this up, if 12-year-old boys know about CBS.
Lots of shows run on sex jokes and bodily functions. The trouble with 2 Broke Girls
is that they’re all so incredibly obvious and juvenile that you wish
Dennings and Behrs had better material to work with. The duo are the
only reason to tune into 2 Broke Girls and even their comic
timing and improved character development are making that a harder
decision because the writing on the show is so woefully bad.
It’s probably too late to get CBS to do anything about the unfortunate racism in 2 Broke Girls
– the time to send notes was during the pilot process, when the Han
character should have been nixed without hesitation. And forget the show
cutting back on its “that’s what she said” sexual joke simplicity.
After all, CBS loves series where one theme gets hammered home
relentlessly (fat jokes on Mike & Molly, nerd jokes on The Big Bang Theory, etc.).
There’s chemistry – and maybe even a whole show (preferably one
without that stupid horse) that can be pulled from the considerable
talents of Dennings and Behrs. But until that happens, 2 Broke Girls
remains the most disappointing new sitcom of the fall, because unlike
so many others it actually had potential but has squandered it away
every week on cheap, predictable and unfunny jokes.
Consider that if you watch tonight. Or better yet, don’t watch.

New CBS comedy series “2 Broke Girls” is attracting
criticism for their portrayal of a Korean character and their alleged
use of racial stereotypes.

The character of Korean immigrant Bryce (Han) Lee, as played by
Matthew Moy, runs the diner where the “2 Broke Girls” (played by Kat
Dennings and Beth Behrs) are employed. As we mentioned in our recap back in September, the only drawback to the series premiere was that Moy's character certainly "walked the line of turning into a stereotype."
CNN's Henry Hanks called it "truly disappointing to see this on an
otherwise smart show," and other critics have since chimed in.The Hollywood Reporter
notes that “each week Han’s broken English gets played like some sorry
minstrel show.” Questionable jokes include emphasizing Lee’s problems
with pronunciation.
Blog Racebending
observes that “Lee can’t wear his pants correctly, can’t speak English
properly, and doesn’t understand the concept of holidays.”
And it’s not just Bryce Lee. “[T]he ensemble of stock ethnics gave me a migraine,” commented New York Magazine writer Emily Nussbaum of the show’s population.HitFix
reports that the show’s creators, Whitney Cummings (who also stars in
“Whitney”), and “Sex and the City” writer Michael Patrick King, claim
the diner is representative of the multi-ethnic neighborhood
(Williamsburg, Brooklyn) it serves.
"By ethnic characters, I'd say the hipsters,” King said when the
question of stereotypes came up during the Television Critics
Association press tour. “And Max is sort of the lord and ruler of that
diner, so she's going to take everybody down, the hipsters, the
immigrants, the girls, and most importantly, herself."
As for the accusation that Bryce Lee is a stereotype, King and
Cummings don’t see it. "There's a comic sweetness to him that's an
innocence, and the fact he's an immigrant from Korea is part of his
character," writer/producer/director King said, noting that the
character will be rounded out as the season goes on.
“The character is not dumb,” Cummings added. “He just moved to the
country six months ago. He literally doesn't know the language. That
doesn't mean he's dumb. In the subsequent episodes, we're going to see
how smart he truly is.”
King may be an equal opportunity offender. When asked if a joke about
Stephen Hawking (who suffers from the motor neuron disease ALS) would
stay in the show, King replied in the affirmative. "Yeah. I think it's
funny," he said. “I'm sorry."
“2 Broke Girls” airs Mondays at 8:30 ET/PT on CBS.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

An awful lot of people agree with the infamous words of “Mean Girls”
character Cady: “Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress
like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.” She
could have gotten more agreement still by adding, “Halloween is the one
night a year when people think it’s OK to dress in totally inappropriate
and racist costumes.”
Ohio University student Sarah Williams says she was at a Halloween
party last year when she snapped a picture of someone in black face. “It
angers me and it’s unacceptable,” Williams said in an interview with
Colorlines.com on Monday. So she and some fellow students decided to do
something about it—and they’ve captured national attention in the
process.
“This
is happening across the country. It’s not just here in Athens, Ohio,”
says Williams, who is the president of a student group at Ohio
University called Students Teaching About Racism in Society (STARS).
The group, made up of 10 students, has created an educational campaign
called “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume” that juxtaposes images like the
one Williams saw last year with an actual African-American student. It
adds a simple statement: “This is not who I am, and this is not okay.”
The
posters have already taken social media by storm, going viral on Tumblr
and Facebook pages around the country. As of Monday evening, they had
been shared more than 50,000 times online, according to Williams.
The
posters will be passed out throughout the dorms on Ohio University’s
Athens campus. The group’s Facebook page reports other schools,
including Columbia University, are interested in distributing the
campaign on their campuses, too.
STARS says their group’s
guiding principle is based on the African principle “Each One Teach
One”. Their mission statement on their website reads: “The purpose of STARS is to educate and facilitate discussion about all
ism’s (racism, sexism, classism, etc.), raise awareness about social
justice, and promote racial harmony. Our job is to create a safe,
non-threatening environment to allow participants to feel comfortable to
express their feelings.” STARS
produced the campaign entirely on its own, with no funding from the
school. But the campaign has made such a positive impression on students
and faculty that the Division of Student Affairs stepped in to help pay
for posters to get printed.
Controversy surrounding racially
offensive Halloween costumes and theme parties have become a routine
part of the holiday on college campuses. Last fall, one Northwestern
University dean went so far as to send an advance email
to the whole student body, urging them to think carefully before
getting decked out. “Halloween is unfortunately a time when the normal
thoughtfulness and sensitivity of most NU students can be forgotten and
some poor decisions are made,” wrote Burgwell Howard. In 2009,
Northwestern had drawn unwanted national attention when party pics of
two varsity athletes dressed in graphic black face made social media
rounds.
Of course, the trend stretches past college campuses. The
black-face costume of choice last year was Antoine Dodson, the young,
poor black man who became a troubling Internet sensation after his
outburst to a local news reporter covering his sister’s sexual assault.
Memes circulated all year, in which producers morphed his screaming
words into songs and audio clips. It was no surprise when, come Oct. 31,
his Facebook page filled with pictures of white people in black face, wearing afro wigs and bandanas and making gang gestures.
In 2009, Target made headlines by selling an “illegal alien” costume
that featured an orange jumpsuit and an alien mask. Kohls previously
sold a “Ghetto Fab Wig.” Colorlines.com rounded up these and other perennially popular racist costumes last year.
In short, costumes mocking people of color are an annual Halloween epidemic. Williams says STARS
has a simple message for classmates planning to join the so-called fun
again this year: “It’s not funny. STARS doesn’t believe that making a
costume of a culture
or race is funny. It only reinforces stereotypes.”
Williams, who’s black, plans on being Janelle Monae on Halloween.

“We’re definitely good, but I don’t think you can say we’re that
original,” he notes. “I regard us as being incredibly good plagiarists.” Coldplay front man Chris Martin in a rolling stone magazine interview

This is the second time this year this plagiarising band is caught and accused of copying other people's songs earlier this year he copied the rythm which is first used by Peter Allen in his song "I go to rio" this rythm which was covered by several artists including the secados in their song "el ritmo de la noche" link

This month the admitted plagiarists once again copied a Vietnamese Singer

The possible lawsuit came
after their “Princess of China” song in the “Mylo Xyloto” album released
on October 17 has been found to bear striking resemblance to her 2008
“Ra ngo tung kinh.”

Ha told Tien Phong newspaper: “If I sue them
for plagiarism, it is like an ant fighting against an elephant. However,
from my lawyer’s opinion, even if the resemblance is just a
coincidence, we still have a case in court if analyses turn up
considerable similarity between the two songs.”

According to Ha, the two songs have a similar mood, beats, and musical arrangement in the introduction piece.

Ha
said it’s unbelievable that Coldplay have listened to her song. She
ventured a hypothesis that the English band could have come across and
listened to it on the Internet without really knowing who wrote it.

“I
need to be careful if I want to sue someone. They will accuse me of
seeking profit if I couldn’t give enough evidence,” she said.

There
have also been comments on the resemblance between the vocal background
style in her song “Ra ngo tung kinh” and that of African indigenous
people’s music.

However, Ha Tran explained that she came up with
the vocal style to use in the background music of the song “Ra ngo tung
kinh,” which was arranged by local musician Thanh Phuong.

American music website ATRL was the first one to mention the resemblance.

One
member shared a post called “Coldplay & Rihanna plagiarizing
Vietnam music?” with the two music clips to compare, which has attracted
six pages of comments.

Disputable copyright is not new to
Coldplay, as the English band was sued by singer Joe Satriani for using a
part of his “If I could fly” song for their Grammy-winning “Viva La
Vida” in 2009.

In September the same year, they went to court in
Los Angeles in the US again when their new music video “Strawberry
Swing” was claimed to be a copy of the MV “Something Else” released one
year earlier by singer Andy J. Gallagher.

You know life in America is screwed up when a headline like that sounds like it’s from The Onion, but it’s totally real. Jezebel noted late on Friday
that Jahessye Shockley, a 5-year-old black girl from Phoenix, has been
missing since October 11, and her grandmother has been pleading for
investigators and the media to pay more attention to her case.
It’s especially disconcerting that Shockley’s disappearance has been
ignored when viewed in comparison with the coverage of missing baby,
Lisa Irwin. Even if you haven’t followed our posts on Irwin’s story,
chances are you saw her face while getting groceries or gas this
weekend, since “What Happened to Baby Lisa?” is the headline blaring on
the front of this week’s People magazine underneath a photo of the
10-month-old.
An Amber Alert was issued for missing ‘Baby Lisa’ on October 4th,
and since then her parents, Deborah Bradley and Jeremy Irwin, have
become suspects in her disappearance — at least in the mind of the
public. It was announced that Bradley and Irwin stopped cooperating with police on October 7th — right around the same time Bradley failed a lie detector test — and a few days later Bradley said she expected to be arrested in relation to Lisa’s alleged kidnapping. On the 17th, People reported that Bradley was blackout drunk when her daughter went missing, and the very next day the couple hired a high-profile lawyer
to represent them. The lawyer, Joe Tacopina, put the kibosh on all
media interviews with the couple. Tacopina is famed for
representing Joran van der Sloot in Peru, where van der Sloot confessed
to killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores.
Bradley initially told police she put her baby Lisa to bed at 10:30
on October 3rd, but has since changed her story and said she put Lisa
down at 6:40. The baby is thought to have been abducted some time
before 4 am, when Irwin came home and discovered her gone. The couple
claims that a window in their home had been tampered with and that their
three cell phones were taken. Earlier in the month, Strollerderby
blogger Stephanie Precourt wondered:

Why didn’t anyone hear anything? The mom was asleep in
another room as were her two older children. Was there no baby monitor?
Were the three cell phones together? Because if someone were to take my
cell phone in the night they’d have to come into my bedroom to find it.
Also, if the dad was working at the time and discovered the child
missing when he came home at 4 am, wouldn’t he have had his cell phone
on him? How could it be taken? And hello it’s 2011 – can’t they trace
cell phones to find exact locations?

We can ask all of these questions because we know so much about Lisa
Irwin’s case. The national media has been all over Baby Lisa’s
disappearance since it happened. The Kansas City Star reported last night
that one of Irwin’s neighbor’s “saw a man carrying a baby in the
neighborhood a few hours” before Lisa disappeared and that “another man
has told reporters he saw a man walking with a baby about three miles
from the Irwin home around 4 that morning.”
But what about Jahessye Shockley? The Grio reports,
“Glendale police believe Jahessye left the home through the front door
but don’t know what happened next. They have no suspects, evidence or
promising leads despite search efforts that included more than 100
officers and volunteers canvassing the area within three miles of the
girl’s home.” No suspects, no evidence, no leads. No information.
According to the Huffington Post, police have cleared nearly 700 tips and leads in Baby Lisa’s case.
It’s not just the media coverage of these two events that has been
disparate, but the treatment of the parents involved as well. The Grio
notes, “Police say they have no reason to suspect anyone in Jahessye’s
family in her disappearance, including her mother, Jerice Hunter,” and
yet, “State Child Protective Services removed Hunter’s three other
children from the home after Jahessye disappeared but have not said
why.”
So Jerice Hunter is suspicious enough to have her other children removed from her home even though police do not believe she was involved,
but Deborah Bradley, who has effectively stopped cooperating with
police, was blackout drunk when her child was “abducted,” who has
changed her story and has failed a lie detector test and who has been accused of being a con artist by a former best friend is fit to keep her other children in her care?
How do you explain that? Racism. Plain and simple.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

On Saturday night, Pat Buchanan
appeared on the white nationalist radio program The Political Cesspool to
promote his new book. During the nearly twenty-five minute interview, Buchanan
attacked the country's increasing diversity and warned that America would face
numerous problems when whites become a minority.
Buchanan has a long history marred
by bigotry and hostility toward minorities. He
recently released a
new book, Suicide of a Superpower, which claims that America is disintegrating as whites lose
their majority status. Buchanan also serves as a political analyst for MSNBC -- an affiliation
that was mentioned by host James Edwards after the interview and on the program's website. The Political Cesspooldescribes
itself as representing "a philosophy that is pro-White ... We wish
to revive the White birthrate above replacement level fertility and beyond to
grow the percentage of Whites in the world relative to other races."
The Anti-Defamation League has criticized
Edwards for having "white supremacist views" and interviewing "a
variety of anti-Semites, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, conspiracy
theorists and anti-immigrant leaders." The Southern Poverty Law
Center wrote
in 2007 that The Political Cesspool host "has probably done more than any of his
contemporaries on the American radical right to publicly promote neo-Nazis,
Holocaust deniers, raging anti-Semites and other extremists" and that his
program "has become the primary radio nexus of hate in America."
The SPLC notes that The Political Cesspool's
guest roster reads like a "Who's Who" of radical racists, with guests like "white
supremacist" Sam Dickson; "white
supremacist" Paul Fromm; anti-Semitic professor Kevin
MacDonald; and "neo-Nazi activist April Gaede." Edwards has also hosted former KKK leader David Duke, of whom Edwards writes:
"Contrary to the false image of a drooling 'racist' that the MSM would like to
paint, David is a very thoughtful, intelligent, and gracious individual." Edwards adds that he counts the anti-Semitic Duke "as a friend" and "I can honestly tell you that there is not a single negative thing that I can say about the man."
Edwards posts his thoughts on The Political
Cesspool's website about topics like:

Slavery. "For blacks in the Americas, slavery is the
greatest thing that ever happened to them. Unfortunately, it's the worst
thing that ever happened to white Americans." August
11, 2008.

LGBTs. "Fags";
"perverts";
"sodomites";
"Until
1973, the American Psychiatric Association rightly listed homosexuality as
a mental illness. It still is, of course, just no longer an officially
listed one. Political correctness took care of that." April 21, 2009; July 11, 2011; July 6, 2011.

Whether "interracial marriage should be illegal": "Despite constant
brainwashing and relentless media propaganda, there still remains a great
number of people in Mississippi who adhere to the values
of their parents. ... The media will predictably dismiss the voters of
Mississippi as 'hicks' and 'rednecks,' but their opinion on this matter is
perfectly legitimate." April
8, 2011.

"Interracial sex." "One
of the most popular movies right now is Sisterhood of the Traveling
Pants: 2, which is being marketed directly to teenage girls. It's
been out about a week and has already grossed almost $25 million dollars.
What's it about? White girls having sex with non-whites. Which is white
genocide. ... Interracial sex is white genocide. Period." August
14, 2008.

Women in the military. "Women have many natural
gifts that men don't have. A man, for instance, could never properly fill
the vitally important maternal role that women (used to) play, but
dressing up and pretending to be a soldier isn't what God had in mind for
the fairer sex. How intimidating do you think it would be to see a platoon
of homosexuals and women (and homosexual women) charging a bunker? Do you
think we could have taken the beach at Normandy with an army like that?
That's a serious question. The answer, of course, is no." September
21, 2011.

During the interview, Buchanan warned about the consequences
of whites becoming a minority in America:

EDWARDS: Moving on to another
aspect of your excellent new book, which I have a review copy right here on my
desk in the studio, you write that white America is an endangered species. Pat,
what's America going to look like if indeed whites do become extinct?
BUCHANAN: Well, I don't think
whites are going to become extinct. But certainly not in the near future. But
what is happening, as you see in California, where Americans of European
descent are already a minority and that is true in Texas and it is true, I
believe, there is one other, New Mexico and Hawaii. And in this decade, I think, six more
states will pass the tipping point where whites become a minority.
I think the best way to understand
what America will look like is to look at California today. I think that is
pretty much what America will look like. The Hispanic population will be
immense. A 150 -- excuse me, 135 million,
according to the Census Bureau statistics, and if you look at California, the
golden land, which used to have -- I mean everybody went there, it was
paradise. The soldiers who went out to the Pacific came home, went through
there, and then went out and made their homes. And what is happening out there,
James, is that -- I mean, look at the bond ratings, it's at the lowest in the country.
The taxes are enormously heavy, they're on the well-to-do and the successful.
It is what they're doing in the country now and these folks are leaving the
state and many of the poor, illegal immigrants, one-third of them head for California, you've got a black-brown war of
the underclass going on in Los Angeles, according to Sheriff Lee Baca, in the
gangs and in the prison, and of course the welfare state is bankrupting
California. And they've got some of the highest taxes in the nation. So I think--this is what the country is going to look
like.

Buchanan was asked
later in the program by Edwards about his chapter on the "cult" of
diversity:

EDWARDS: You know, when you talk
about the cult of diversity in the book, and this is a follow-up to the topic
that we're on, it seems as though the white politicos who are explicitly
involved, they seem to work against their own group interests, rather than for
them, as the minorities do. Again, this chapter that you write on the cult of diversity, I have to ask
this question, why do white liberals remain entranced by diversity when the
social and cultural effects of diversity are almost entirely negative for
themselves and their children and grandchildren.

Buchanan replied: "Well, I think there's many people
candidly who -- I've been asked on radio, that 'what is wrong if a -- I mean, why
isn't it a really good thing when whites become a minority nationwide and we're
all part of minorities?' And I say, you know, this thing, I mean, real problems are
attendant to this" and cited "racial preferences and affirmative action."
Buchanan added that white males are "really the ones who are the victims of affirmative action,
not the beneficiaries, and yet they're thirty percent of the country but
they're seventy-five percent of the dead and wounded coming back from
Afghanistan. That's not a formula for social peace."
Buchanan also told Edwards that he thinks America will "be a
Balkanized country, sort of a Tower of Babel" when whites are no longer in the
racial majority.
Edwards complimented Buchanan throughout the interview, telling
him that his book "is an epic. It's thicker than the Bible, and like the
Good Book, there's not a wasted word in it." Edwards called
Buchanan a "true hero" who inspired him to become politically active -- Edwards served as a delegate for Buchanan in 2000 -- and told
his listeners that he wanted to see the book at number one on Amazon by the
time the interview was over.
Buchanan's interview gained notice over the weekend among a certain segment of Buchanan's fan base. The white supremacist group Council of Conservative Citizens promoted the interview on its website. And the National Policy Institute, which the SPLC describes as a "white supremacist think tank," posted the interview on its NPI TV page.
It's extremely unlikely that Buchanan was unaware of the
program's views when he appeared on the program. Media Matters, The Southern
Poverty Law Center and The Anti-Defamation League criticized
Buchanan for previously appearing on the program. Buchanan guested in 2006 and
2008. In a 2008 press release, ADL National Director Abraham
Foxman said of Buchanan, "It's not as if he did this by accident." Foxman added, "Anyone who would have made
inquiries into the nature of this program would have realized that it is an
outlet for racism, anti-Semitism and hate."
At the conclusion of the interview, Edwards reminisced with
Buchanan about "mutual friend[s]" Linda Muller (who runs Buchanan.org) and Marcus Epstein, who
helped Buchanan with research on the book. Epstein, a writer and
activist with a history of inflammatory statements about race and immigration,
was previously arrested for attacking a woman with a "karate chop"
and calling her the n-word.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

This short-film ad spot for designer Proenza Schouler is probably the
most racist, disturbing, and bizarre thing I’ve seen in a long time.
Designers Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough took a trip through
the southwest and came up with their fall line of clothing inspired,
apparently, by Native Americans they had seen on the road.
Then they asked indie-filmmaker Harmony Korine – of Kids fame - to produce a short film promoting the new designs, and Korine came up with this:

Maybe it’s just me – maybe I just don’t get pretentious art-house
avant garde indie films or something, but the whole thing creeps me out.
I know a lot of Native Americans, and I would feel really uncomfortable
watching this with them – I feel uncomfortable watching this anyways,
and would even without the blatant racism.
This is the opposite of advertising. Not sure what you call it when a company sets out to chase customers away, but whatever it’s called this is it.

Pat Buchanan: Minorities Aren't "Bad For The Country," But...

October 18, 2011 3:31 pm ET by Solange Uwimana

Pat
Buchanan doesn't think "minorities are bad for the country." At least that's
what he claimed last night on Fox News. In
an interview with Sean Hannity to discuss his new book, Suicide of a
Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, Buchanan expanded on part of the
book's premise, that America is "disintegrating" because "white America is an
endangered species." Though he claimed that
minorities aren't "bad for the country," the America of 2041 Buchanan sketched
is one that is bankrupt economically, confounded by crime and lawlessness, and where
English is a second language.
Here
is Buchanan trying to explain the main points in the chapter of his book
titled, "The End of White America":

HANNITY: I want you to explain it in your
words 'cause I think people will interpret it, Pat -- is that, oh, so white
America's going, so that means the end of America? Are you saying that
minorities are bad for the country.
BUCHANAN: No, not at all. No, not at all. But
the title is taken from the title of an article, cover article in Atlantic
Magazine, exactly, "The End Of White America." What does it mean -- and the
fellow wrote it about what does it mean for the culture? And so, I looked at it
from what does it mean for the United States of America when white Americans in
2041 become a minority in the country along with Asians-American minority,
African-Americans, and Hispanic-Americans. And you try to envisualize what's
going to happen. And America's gonna look very much like California right now.
And what does that mean?
California is bankrupt. It's bond rating is
the lowest of any place. Los Angeles, half the people there don't speak English
as -- in their own homes -- 5 million people. And you've got all the problems
of crimes. You've got a black-brown war among the underclass, as one sheriff described
it, in the prisons and in the gangs. And people are leaving California. And
it's the old tax consumers are coming in.
Now, these are not bad or evil people. Even
the ones who are illegal. They're coming to work, many of them. They're coming
for a better life. But the truth is they are bankrupting the state of
California because of that divide you mentioned between taxpayers and tax
consumers. And what happens when all of America is like that, when every
American city is like LA?

Buchanan
added: "What California is today, America is in 2041 if we don't change
course."

How else would one interpret those words if not:
"[M]inorities are bad for the country" unless there are more white people?
Indeed,
Buchanan goes even further later in the discussion, complaining:

BUCHANAN: Republicans can't win California
today. It's not because the people are evil, but they are Democratic. They
depend on government. They believe in government, and they vote for the party
of government. When Texas goes the same way -- and whites are a minority in
Texas -- when it becomes predominantly overwhelmingly Hispanic, it is going to
become predominantly Democratic. That's the end of the Republican Party.

Buchanan
concluded by suggesting "a moratorium on immigration." There's no clearer
indication of what Buchanan thinks of minorities and immigrants than his
remarks to Sean Hannity.
Buchanan has a long history of bigotry. He has been warning
that America will become "a
Third World country" since at least 1990 when he warned about the
"Euro-Americans ... who founded the United States" becoming the minority.
And
his call to end all immigration is something Buchanan has been calling for, for
years, as well. In his 2006 book, State of Emergency, for example,
Buchanan wrote:

"This
[immigration] is an invasion, the greatest invasion in history." [p.
5]

"We
are witnessing how nations perish. We are entered upon the final act of
our civilization. The last scene is the deconstruction of the nations. The
penultimate scene, now well underway, is the invasion unresisted."
[p. 6]

"The
first imperative is an immediate moratorium on all immigration, such as
the one we imposed from 1924 to 1965. ... But even with a moratorium,
success is not assured." [p. 250-251]

During
the Fox News discussion, Buchanan said he named "The End of White America"
chapter of his book after an Atlantic Magazine article. But the author of the Atlantic
article of the same name arrived at a conclusion that was the exact opposite of
Buchanan's. In the January/February 2009 issue of the magazine, Vassar College
English professor Hua Hsu wrote:

This vision of the aggrieved white man lost
in a world that no longer values him was given its most vivid expression in the
1993 film Falling Down. Michael Douglas plays Bill Foster, a downsized
defense worker with a buzz cut and a pocket protector who rampages through a
Los Angeles overrun by greedy Korean shop-owners and Hispanic gangsters,
railing against the eclipse of the America he used to know. (The film came out
just eight years before California became the nation's first majority-minority
state.) Falling Down ends with a soulful police officer apprehending
Foster on the Santa Monica Pier, at which point the middle-class vigilante
asks, almost innocently: "I'm the bad guy?"
BUT THIS IS a nightmare vision. Of course
most of America's Bill Fosters aren't the bad guys--just as civilization is not,
in the words of Tom Buchanan, "going to pieces" and America is not, in the
phrasing of Pat Buchanan, going "Third World." The coming white minority does
not mean that the racial hierarchy of American culture will suddenly become
inverted, as in 1995's White Man's Burden, an awful thought experiment
of a film, starring John Travolta, that envisions an upside-down world in which
whites are subjugated to their high-class black oppressors. There will be
dislocations and resentments along the way, but the demographic shifts of the
next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone's
lives, producing a culture that's more likely than any before to treat its
inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group.

Hsu
concluded:

[W]e aspire to be post-racial, but we still
live within the structures of privilege, injustice, and racial categorization
that we inherited from an older order. We can talk about defining ourselves by
lifestyle rather than skin color, but our lifestyle choices are still racially
coded. We know, more or less, that race is a fiction that often does more harm
than good, and yet it is something we cling to without fully understanding why
-- as a social and legal fact, a vague sense of belonging and place that we
make solid through culture and speech.
But maybe this is merely how it used to be --
maybe this is already an outdated way of looking at things. "You have a lot of
young adults going into a more diverse world," Carter remarks. For the young
Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s, culture is something to be taken apart
and remade in their own image. "We came along in a generation that didn't have
to follow that path of race," he goes on. "We saw something different." This
moment was not the end of white America; it was not the end of anything. It was
a bridge, and we crossed it.

Pat Buchanan: Blacks Have Lost The American Identity They Had During Segregation

October 19, 2011 6:11 pm ET by Eric Hananoki

During a radio appearance promoting
his book, MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan argued that blacks and whites were
more unified during the 1950s than they are today. Buchanan argued that "what
we had then, which was a sense of cultural and social one-ness, we were
a people, that I think that is what's being lost." Buchanan added that
while blacks considered themselves Americans first and foremost during
the era of segregation, today they're using "hyphenated terms" like "African-American" to describe themselves.
Buchanan's
remark came yesterday on the radio program of Mark Davis. Davis
asked Buchanan to expand on his theory that, in Davis' words, "black
Americans of 1960 were more woven into the fabric of the America of
that time than many of today's black Americans are woven into the
America of this time."
Buchanan replied that during the 1950s, blacks and whites "all had a common religion, we all worshiped the same God,
we all went to schools where American literature was taught, the
English language was our language, we all rooted for the same teams, we
read the same newspapers, we listened to the same music. We were a
people then. We were all Americans. Now I'm not saying segregation was
good. But what I was saying, that did not prevent us from being one
people."
Buchanan then said that blacks today have lost the American identity they had in the 1950s:

BUCHANAN: If you'd ask
those black folks that are traveling abroad, "Who are you," "I am an
American." That was their first identity in my judgment at that time.
Clearly they were African-Americans, but we didn't use hyphenated terms
in those days. And so I think what we had then, which was a sense of
cultural and social one-ness, we were a people, that I think that is
what's being lost. Across the divide now, people are calling names,
they're not communicating, and I think it's really a tragedy and it
could be a disaster for this country.

Buchanan painted a similar picture of the 1940s and 1950s in his 1988 book Right From The Beginning. In his chapter "Then and Now: A Tale of Two Cities," Buchanan wrote of his upbringing in segregated Washington D.C.:

Any resemblance between this cosmopolitan capital and the
sleepy Southern city where we grew up is coincidental. Segregation was a way of
life in postwar Washington, but, unlike parts of the Eastern Shore of Maryland,
which were little slices of Mississippi, Washington never belonged to the "mean
South." The only genuine "racist" I ever knew was the father of a
grammar-school classmate, a red-faced, black-haired Irishman who kept a rack of rifles and shotguns in his
dining room, and talked incessantly of "the niggers." His wife and kids,
however, were the nicest of people, polar opposites.
Over the years, I have come to agree with a friend that "racism
is an obsessive preoccupation with the subject of race. The racist sees
everything in life, education and politics, from the standpoint of race.
His
viewpoint on everything is pervaded by his obsession." By that
definition,
racism is as prevalent in black America today as in white America. In
the late 1940s and early '50s, however, race was never a preoccupation
with us; we rarely
thought about it.
There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every
slight. The "Negroes" of Washington had their public schools, restaurants,
bars, movie houses, playgrounds, and churches; and we had ours. Neither
community could have been called rich.
We had no right to vote, when I was growing up, no
elections. We were governed by three "commissioners," appointed by the
President, and governed well. One of them, Walter Tobriner, was my father's
good friend; he didn't need a limousine, but drove to work in his own car. The
white public schools were run by one appointed commissioner, the black schools
by another. And the schools ran well; the best of them were the equal of the
Catholic schools.
[...]
In the 1950s, there were no food stamps or Medicaid payments
or rent supplements. The relief agencies were the churches. But no one starved;
no "homeless" froze to death, and no shake-down artist extorted millions out of
the White House by threatening to starve himself to death; and everyone worked.
Black teenage unemployment was 9 percent in 1948, today, it runs between 35 and
50 percent.
In 1950, the same bus that was jammed with white-collar
workers in their snap-brim hats coming south from Kensington to Chevy Chase
Circle, to catch the L-4 downtown, carried the "maids," the black cleaning
ladies, back out to Kensington to work all day in the houses the white men had
left an hour before. When it snowed, the kids at Blessed Sacrament would gather
at the circle and barrage the "Boston Blackie" with snow balls as it rolled by,
heading north out the two-lane road that was Connecticut Avenue. The white
driver was always more outraged than his passengers, who laughed at the
diversion from the day's drudgery provided by the little white boys.
Now the cleaning ladies in the affluent suburbs of
Washington are Korean and Mexican and Salvadorean, and tens of thousands of Washington's
black women and their children are second- and third-generation welfare
clients. Supposedly, they are better off.

Buchanan, who just released his new book Suicide Of A Superpower, has a long history of bigotry and hostility toward minorities.
From the October 18 edition of WPAB's The Mark Davis Show:

DAVIS:
There's a statement you made maybe three or four books back that I've
quoted so much, so often, always with credit, because it makes people's
eyebrows go way up, but they need to pause and understand it, and that
is that the African-Americans,
the black Americans of pre-Civil Rights Act America -- I mean, yes, it,
was a country that had colored water fountains, and nobody is looking to
go back to that, but the black Americans of 1960 were more woven into
the fabric of the America of that time than many of today's black
Americans are woven into the America of this time. What do you make of
that?
BUCHANAN: You know, that's -- let me tell you, I grew up in Washington, D.C. I was in high school when Brown vs. The Board Of Education
came down and I remember before it came down we had one black player on
our football team, a Catholic team, and public high schools wouldn't
play us. And we had to go up to Pennsylvania on these back roads and
find teams that would play our school.
But you are right. In the 1950s, for example, Washington, D.C.,
was a segregated town. It wasn't Birmingham, Alabama, but it was
segregated, clear and simple. But we all had a common religion, we all
worshiped the same god, we all went to schools where American literature
was taught, the English language was our language, we all rooted for
the same teams, we read the same newspapers, we listened to the same
music. We were a people then. We were all Americans.
Now
I'm not saying segregation was good. But what I was saying, that did
not prevent us from being one people. If you'd ask those black folks
that are traveling abroad, "Who are you?" "I am an American." That was
their first identity in my judgment at that time. Clearly they were
African-Americans, but we
didn't use hyphenated terms in those days. And so I think that what we
had then, which was a sense of cultural and social one-ness, we were a
people, that I think that is what is
being lost. Across the divide now, people are calling names, they're
not communicating, and I think it's really a tragedy and it could be a
disaster for this country.

"I fried another n-----."
That's how racist NYPD cop Michael Daragjati described falsely charging a black man with resisting arrest on Staten Island, authorities said Monday.
"Another
n----- fried, no big deal," crowed Daragjati, according to a
transcript of a phone conversation intercepted by the feds.
Daragjati,
who is white, is charged with violating the unnamed man's civil rights
by fabricating the charges because he mouthed off about being stopped
and frisked by the cop last April.
The incident is believed to be racially-motivated because Daragjati used the n-word repeatedly in the monitored phone calls.
The complaint, unsealed in Brooklyn Federal Court, does not specify who was the target of the monitoring.
Daragjati,
32, was assisgned to plainclothes anti-crime patrol when he stopped the
man on Targee St. and rougly frisked him, the complaint states.
When
the man complained about his treatment and asked for the cop's name and
badge number, he was allowed to walk away. But after he shouted
insults back at the officer, Daragjati crossed the street and cuffed
him.
Daragjati swore out a complaint in Staten Island Criminal Court falsely claiming the man had pushed and kicked him and "flail his arms" to prevent being arrested.
Several
other officers had witnessed the arrest in which the man offered no
resistence. The victim pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct on the
advice of his lawyer.
"The power to arrest...must be used fairly, responsibly and without bias," said Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch. "Motivated by racial aniumus, the defendant allegedly abused this power and responsibility."
Daragjati
was also charged with insurance fraud in connection with his off-duty
snow removal business and the beatdown of a victim he suspected of
stealing a piece of snowplow equipment.NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly praised the feds' handling of the case.

Another privileged, sheltered white woman who never have to put up with the same racist stereotypes that women of colour have to go through decided to hold a racist poster. and like with the previous woman NONE of the white marchers find this sign insulting, racist and dehumanizing. proving once again that slutwalk is a subtle white racist movement where the leadership only consists of privilege white women, ignoring the stereotypes that are regularly directed at women of colour

second time this week another hack is caught copying another music artist

Kelly's Rowland's new video for her single "Lay It On Me" is causing
quite the buzz, but it's not the quite the chatter that the former
Destiny's Child star way want.
Rowland's video is drawing comparisons to Bajan songstress Livvi
Franc's 2009 hit "Now I'm That B*tch". Both videos feature the singers
in skimpy outfits with shirtless, buff dudes in identical positions. But
the most damning visual is the scene where Rowland and Franc are
wrapped in tight PVC bands albeit in different colors.

Although Sarah Chatfield directed both videos, many are wondering if
the blame should be on Rowland for swagger jacking or the director for
providing the same video treatment to the two stars.
Rowland's sister in song Beyonce is also caught up in a video controversy of her own.
Last week, the "Single Ladies" hit maker dropped the video for
"Countdown" off of her newest album 4. Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa
De Keersmaeker blasted the singer for ripping her moves from a 1983
dance piece she choreographed called "Rosas danst Rosas".
Now that two-thirds of destiny's children are embroiled in copycat
scandals, the only person left unscathed is Michelle Williams. Watch out
Tenitra!

Awaiting trial on a charge of conspiracy to murder is not generally a good time to launch a new beauty product.But when the products in question are skin-whiteners, you're probably used to the negative publicity.Jamaican
dancehall artist Vybz Kartel is launching his own range of men's
cosmetics this month, which includes a variety of 'skin-brightening'
items.

He has also been charged in connection with
the murder of a promoter in Kingston in July - as well as for illegal possession of a firearm and some drugs-related offences.The
musician, who was nominated in the reggae artist of the year category
at last year's MOBOs, has been an advocate of lightening your skin for a
while now.He originally
claimed to use cake soap - a clothes-bleaching product - to lighten his
skin, so that it was easier to see his tattoos.

But after the Jamaican manufacturer
of the product, Blue Power Group, refuted his claims, Kartel explained
that he actually used his own special concoction.Soon his secret recipe will be available to buy.Skin
whitening has been a controversial - and very worrying - trend among
women for decades. It has become so commonplace that some cosmetics
firms have been accused of making their Indian and black models look
paler in their campaigns.Adverts starring both Beyonce and Freida Pinto have been affected.

But now men being encouraged to bleach their skin too.Pale skin is seen by bleaching
advocates as desirable as it is thought to imply wealth. Poorer people
who work in the sunshine in hot countries on the fields get darker skin -
which they might then choose to try and bleach.As
historian Elsa Goveia puts it, the structuring principle of Caribbean
societies is 'the belief that the blacker you are the more inferior you
are and the whiter you are the more superior you are.'Clearly, this has very negative connotations on issues of race, and self confidence. In defence of his controversial beauty
regime, Vybz Kartel has explained that he sees lightening your skin as
no different to straightening your hair or getting a tan.

In a statement to Vibe.com, the
artist defended his use of cake soap, he said: 'When black women stop
straightening their hair and wearing wigs and weaves, when white women
stop getting lip and butt injections and implants … then I'll stop using
the 'cake soap' and we'll all live naturally ever after.' Jamaican health authorities see the matter a little differently.Local doctors are dealing with increasing numbers of patients who have burnt their skin with black-market bleaching products.The craze is so serious that in 2007
the Jamaican government ran a campaign called 'Don't Kill The Skin' to
highlight the dangers of using the products.Keysha
Davis, editor of Blackhair magazine, thinks it is especially worrying
that skin-lightening products are being endorsed by influential
celebrities.

She told The
Guardian: 'I think historically it has been black women who've had
self-identity issues and so might use those products rather than black
men.'To hear that Vybz Kartel is putting out a skin lightening cream is quite disturbing, I feel, and quite sad.'His
products are launching in the Caribbean initially, but Vybz Kartel has
high hopes for the moisturisers, fragrances and soaps. He told the
Tribune: 'I wanna
see them in Macy's and all other fine retailers worldwide.'The
musician's endorsements have not always gone to plan in the past,
though. His brand of Daggering condoms had a reputation for splitting,
and his Street Vybz Rum was deemed too expensive.The
DJ clearly has bigger worries than whether this range of cosmetics will
sell or not, though. He has been charged in connection with the July
murder of Barrington 'Bossie' Burton, a 27-year-old promoter in
Kingston, Jamaica.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

A leading choreographer has accused Beyoncé of "stealing" dance moves, after the American singer launched her latest music video.
According to entertainment website AceShowbiz.com, choreography in the video for Beyoncé's new single Countdown, released last week, shows a number of similarities with work by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
Speaking to a Danish blog, De Keersmaeker said she had not been asked
permission: "I didn't know anything about this. I'm not mad, but this is
plagiarism."
Two routines in the video, which shows
Beyoncé and her backing dancers in a number of disused buildings, have
come under scrutiny. One creates a split-screen effect, with the singer
looking to camera through a window on the left, while three female
dancers perform a ballet
routine in the background on the right. A remarkably similar effect and
movements appear in De Keersmaeker's first work with her company, Rosas
Danst Rosas. Another sequence strongly resembles choreography from
Achterland, a filmed version of which won the Dance Screen award in
1994.
Beyoncé has not responded to the allegations, but her co-director, Adria Petty,
has previously spoken about showing the singer footage of European
contemporary dance for inspiration. She told MTV News: "I brought
Beyoncé a number or references and we picked some out together. Most
were German modern dance references, believe it or not." Petty said the
process was "evolving [and] spontaneous".
It is the second
time Beyoncé has been accused of plagiarism this year, after
choreography and visual effects for her performance of Run the World
(Girls) at the Billboard Music awards in May was likened to one by Lorella Cuccarini. In that instance, Beyoncé subsequently admitted having been inspired by Cuccarini.
De
Keersmaeker has been a major force in contempoary dance for more than
30 years, creating work that has received critical acclaim and popular
success around the world. In a 2009 profile,
the Guardian's Sanjoy Roy described her as "a difficult choreographer
with a popular following, a minimalist with a tendency to dramatise, a
reiticent person with a lot to say".
De
Keersmaeker continued: "What's rude is that they don't even bother about
hiding it. They seem to think they could do it because it's a famous
work … Am I honoured? Look I've seen local school kids doing this.
That's a lot more beautiful."

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

If the rain had stopped
That day
I might surely have just walked past you
If the bus had arrived
At its usual time
I wouldn’t have met you

If that instant
Had been slightly different
We would have walked on separate paths of fate

I always want to watch
The same future together with you
Let’s look at the same stars
At the same spot
I wonder if I am present
In the future you imagine for yourself
I want to look up to
The same sky with the same feelings

Our ways of talking and acting
Are really similar
It’s like if we have always known each other
Mailing each other at the same time
Thinking about the same things
We might have been bound together by a red thread

We fit so well together, like if
It was decided by chance right from the start
I believe we are fated to be together

I wonder if I am present
In the future you imagine for yourself
I want to look up to
The same sky with the same feelings

I always want to watch
The same future together with you
Let’s look at the same stars
At the same spot
I wonder if I am present
In the future you imagine for yourself
I want to look up to
The same sky with the same feelings

So we may always walk
On the same path, hand in hand
Even on days filled with tears
And on sunny days

I always want to watch
The same future together with you
Let’s look at the same stars
At the same spot
I wonder if I am present
In the future you imagine for yourself
I want to look up to
The same sky with the same feelings

In every case, clinical questioning revealed that the women had
used skin-whitening creams — many for years. In other words, these women
had tried so desperately to whiten their skin color that they had
poisoned their bodies by applying mercury-based “beauty creams.”
Ninety percent of the women entering border clinics in Arizona with
mercury poisoning were Mexican-American, and they like their Mexican
counterparts had been using skin-whitening creams such as “Crema de
Belleza-Manning,” which is manufactured in Mexico. These skin-whitening
creams contain mercurous chloride, which is readily absorbed through the
skin. Saudi, African, and Asian women were also using these
skin-bleaching chemicals in a tragic attempt to change their appearance
to that of white women.